Photos of her flat contributed by an indoor worker in the UK

The other week a bill passed the US state of Rhode Island’s legislature closing a loophole that permitted prostitution indoors. While Nevada’s licensed brothels are famous out of proportion to their number and size, few people knew about the Rhode Island situation, which had been going on for many years. In the following story I removed government spokespeople’s statements about how this law ‘brings the state into line’ with the rest of the US (always excepting Nevada) and will help stop sex trafficking and other kinds of organised crime (go to the original story for those). Here are excerpts focusing on the comments of one former sex worker: how she sees the difference in her life if forced to stop selling sex and go into various government assistance programmes. Also note the comments by police: since no extra funds have been allotted for enforcement, he expects little to change.

What does the ban on indoor prostitution mean for RI?
Vasundhara Prasad, The Brief, 10 November 2009

. . . While it was clear that the legal status of indoor prostitution was an unintentional loophole for the past several years, what is less clear is the impact that the ban has had on those whose livelihoods depended it. Are all indoor prostitutes victims of sex trafficking and abuse? Stephanie, a pseudonym, is a twenty five year old mother who runs her own service.

Stephanie: “I’m a single mother, at one point I didn’t have money to feed my kids or myself, so that’s when I got into the business and that’s how i’ve been supporting myself and my kids.” But since the ban was signed into law, she’s stopped, and she’s left with very few options, especially in this economy. “Now that the law’s been passed, I’ve stopped but I also have no money and I’m not sure of what to do now. I’m looking for a job, but it’s kinda impossible. Running out of food, so it’s a sucky situation.”

When asked about people in this situation, Amy Kempe insists that people like Stephanie have other options. “There are a number of resources available to assist individuals during economic recession. Be it food stamps, be it public assistance, be it job training programs.” . . . training programs in healthcare, customer service, and biotechnology. But the single mother of a two and seven year old says the quality of life for her family is dramatically worse when she relies on government services.

Stephanie: “I struggled on a daily basis. I barely had enough to pay the bills and the rent. Then when I started in the business, my kids never went hungry another day. I mean, we went from living on peanut butter sandwiches and noodles to having nice normal meals – breakfast, lunch, and dinner – and being able take my kids and just live a good life. Now I’m not really sure what I’m going to do.” And she says she’s not the only one in this situation.

Stephanie: “Almost every girl I know that has ever been in the business has children and this is how they support, you know, their lifestyle. And a lot of the girls I know go to school – so the way it’s affecting me, it’s going to affect them. Basically paying the rent and making sure the kids are fed. It’s gonna be hard.”

. . . Whether or not the ban on prostitution will be good or bad for the state and its residents, what about the issue of enforcement? Lieutenant Correias had this to say. “It’s not legal any more to go into someone’s home or their home or a hotel room and engage in prostitution. . . So they should be prepared that if they’re going to continue that they may get arrested.” But he added that he doesn’t see this new law as the most important issue on the agenda of his Narcotics and Organized Crime unit.  “It’ll be our responsibility to enforce it, but no we’re not getting any more manpower or working more hours. If we were to have any reason to believe that there’s human trafficking involved certainly we’ll move it up the priority scale, but the reduction of violent crime and gun violence specifically will always be our number one priority.”

. . . “If you’re looking at ­ this crime, it’s a misdemeanor. I mean you’re not going to see a lot of people going to jail for prostitution. We’ll never rid the city of prostitution.”

With that knowledge in hand, one can’t help but wonder the same thing as our single mother of two: “I just didn’t see how it was necessary because I didn’t see how it was harming anyone. I thought there were bigger issues that needed to be tackled in the state like the unemployment rate and the crime. But I guess this was something they thought was necessary.”

Sometimes the Rescue Industry reverts to farce. Take the recent history of Brazil with its efforts to appear ‘modern’ and world-powerful through militaristic social-control operations. Before I even got to the part of this article that mentions carnaval, I had thought ‘circus’ to describe what I was reading. These are excerpts from Operation Princess in Rio de Janeiro: Policing ‘Sex Trafficking’, Strengthening Worker Citizenship, and the Urban Geopolitics of Security in Brazil, by Paul Amar, in Security Dialogue 2009; 40; 513.

. . . Operation Princess and its sister campaigns were launched by the police in seeming disregard for the fact that prostitution is legal in Brazil. The Pentecostal evangelical leaders of Rio  . . . gave biblical legitimacy to the campaign, brushing aside questions of legality or sex workers’ resistance to being ‘rescued’. . . .

. . . proclaimed he would purge corruption and promote moral rectitude . . . by bringing back the spirit of the Vice Police stations (Delegacias de Costumes), which had been closed for the most part in the 1940s when prostitution was legalized. Simultaneously, President Lula declared a nationwide war against sex trafficking . . .

. . . ‘Operation Princess’ resonated perfectly with the 19th-century iconography of missionarism, child rescue, and abolition in Brazil. . . Avenida Princesa Isabel is the grand boulevard that brings travelers . . . into Copacabana Beach, a mixed-class and mixed-race coastal community that also serves as a center of sex tourism and international diplomatic conferences. Copacabana was a focal point of the new vice-policing operations. . . the statue of Princess Isabel, with her arms outstretched, blessing those she liberated from slavery and radiating a spirit of tolerance and welcome at the gateway to the topless dance clubs and all-night saunas of the Lido.  . .

. . . [the] Black Movement in Brazil ha[s] rigorously critiqued the ‘Princess Isabel Syndrome’, or the commemoration of this child monarch as the agent of abolition. . . it takes credit away from the centuries of sacrifice and mobilization among Brazil’s Afro-descendants and their efforts . . . Thus, the princess metaphor in Rio de Janeiro . . . resonates vibrantly with the politics of social ‘whitening’ (embrancamento), infantilization of black slave agency, and religious moralization.

. . . By the time Lula assumed power in 2003, a massive child-rescue initiative was deemed essential to Brazil’s plans to legitimize and empower itself on the world stage, as well as to address social-justice concerns at home. For Brazil to assume leadership of the democratic global south and make a claim to the proposed new seat on the Security Council, it wanted to change the image of Brazilian law enforcement from death squad to rescue mission, authoritarian to humanitarian. The national landscape had to be cleared of lawless, victimized children.

‘Operation Carnival’ became the first test of this revived vice-police campaign. As if to mock the new police operations, a ‘Group A’ Samba School . . .  celebrated ‘Prostitution in Copacabana’ as their theme that year; their 4,000 sequined dancers, the ‘Lions of Nova Iguaçu’, marched through the downtown Sambadrome, singing a samba about the joys of the sex trade. In its debut, the police’s anti-sex-trafficking campaign netted a total of one arrest . . .

During ‘Operation Shangrilá’, the Federal Police raided a showboat in Rio’s Guanabara Bay. Forty Brazilian prostitutes and twenty-nine American tourists were arrested for having committed the crime of ‘sex tourism’. This incident was immediately trumpeted as a major bust of a ‘human trafficking’ operation. . . . But . . no Brazilian law had been violated. None of the prostitutes were underage, nor had they violated any pimping or brothel laws. The only way this situation could be imagined as ‘trafficking’ was because the tourists had crossed international frontiers, although without breaking any laws or visa restrictions. Furthermore, ‘sex tourism’ is not against any Brazilian law, unless one assumes that sex tourism is the same thing as forced sex trafficking.

Everleigh Club, Chicago

When critics bring up the similarity of today’s trafficking brouhaha with white-slavery scares, they most often point to William Steads investigation for the Pall Mall Gazette in London in the late 19th century. In the April 2008 issue of Reason Magazine, Joanne McNeill reviews Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul, by Karen Abbott. I’ve highlighted some phrases that show how the same contradictory interpretations of ‘the evidence’ occurred back then and the same rhetoric from those who hate prostitution. 

The ‘White Slavery’ Panic: Anti-prostitution activists have been equating sex work with slavery for over a century. 

In 1907 a group of evangelicals visited Chicago’s Everleigh Club brothel, where they handed out leaflets that said, “No ‘white slave’ need remain in slavery in this State of Abraham Lincoln who made the black slaves free.” According to the Illinois poet Edgar Lee Masters, an Everleigh Club regular, “the girls laughed in their faces.” In Sin in the Second City, the Atlanta-based journalist Karen Abbott recounts how Minna Everleigh, one of the club’s proprietors, “explained graciously, patiently, that the Everleigh Club was free from disease, that [a doctor] examined the girls regularly, that neither she nor Ada [Everleigh, her sister and co-proprietor] would tolerate anything approaching violence, that drugs were forbidden and drinks tossed out, that guests were never robbed nor rolled, and that there was actually a waiting list of girls, spanning the continental United States, eager to join the house. No captives here, Reverends.”

The Everleigh Club was an ornate mansion. Thirty themed boudoirs (“the Japanese Parlor,” “the Moorish Room,” “the Egyptian Room”) included absurd touches of decadence, such as hidden buttons to ring for champagne and a fountain that fired a jet of perfume. The city’s finest chefs prepared the women’s dinners. They read poetry by the fire with guests, who included the writers Theodore Dreiser and Ring Lardner. Sometimes Minna and Ada let swarms of butterflies fly loose throughout the house.

Some anti-prostitution activists nevertheless believed the Everleigh ladies were no different from slaves. Then as now, opponents of prostitution assumed that no woman in her right mind consensually exchanges sex for money. Abbott challenges that view in her account of Chicago’s red light district at the turn of the last century. She interweaves the stories of sex workers and clientele, evangelical activists and conservative bureaucrats, explaining how the term “white slavery” was routinely applied to consenting adults. Reading her historical account, you can hear echoes of that debate in the current crusade against sex trafficking, which similarly blurs the line between coercion and consent.

The Everleigh sisters, Abbott notes, believed a sex worker was “more than an unwitting conduit for virtue. An employee in a business, she was an investment and should be treated as such, receiving nutritious meals, a thorough education, expert medical care, and generous wages. In their house, a courtesan would make a living as viable as—and more lucrative than—those earned by the thousands of young women seeking work in cities as stenographers and sweatshop seamstresses, department store clerks and domestics. The sisters wanted to uplift the profession, remove its stain and stigma, argue that a girl can’t lose her social standing if she stands level with those poised to judge her.”

The attempt to portray prostitutes as professionals never made much headway against the tendency to view them as victims. At the beginning of Sin in the Second City, Abbott describes an event in 1887 that forever changed the American public’s perception of sex workers. Authorities raided a Michigan lumber camp, finding nine women working as prostitutes. Eight accepted their prison sentences, but the ninth woman protested that she was tortured and forced into sex slavery. The lumberyard proprietors claimed the women were well aware of what they were hired to do; “the job description,” Abbott notes, “made no mention of cutting trees.” But the public was so moved by the woman’s story that she was pardoned and released from jail.

It was 20 years before another case of “white slavery” was reported in a Midwestern newspaper. But in the meantime, rumors of girls who were “trafficked” into sex slavery began to circulate. In 1899 the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union missionary Charlton Edholm reported, “There is a slave trade in this country, and it is not black folks at this time, but little white girls —thirteen, fourteen, sixteen, and seventeen years of age—and they are snatched out of our arms, and from our Sabbath schools and from our Communion tables.” Perhaps they found themselves in a “false employment snare,” in which a young rural girl answered a city want ad and found herself locked in a brothel, her clothes held for ransom. Or maybe a gentleman from the big city, after plying her with drinks or drugs, deflowered her and sold her to a pimp.

Around the same time, anti-prostitution evangelical groups revised their platforms. Victorian society previously had reviled prostitutes as lost women who reduced men to animals. The rhetorical shift conveniently removed the prostitute’s responsibility for her actions. “Reformers across the country repeated and embellished Edholm’s narratives, panders used them as handy instruction manuals, and harlots memorized all the ways they might be tricked or trapped,” Abbott writes. These rumors reinforced rural Midwesterners’ fears of losing their children to the dirty, crime-ridden streets of Chicago. “Never before in civilization,” wrote Hull House founder Jane Addams in 1909, “have such numbers of girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.” Read the rest at Reason.

Con todo el debate ideológico sobre la prostitución, salen poco simples testimonios de personas que han decidido viajar y trabajar en la industria del sexo. Cuando digo ‘decidido’ quiero decir que puede que tengan pocas opciones para salir adelante pero sí tienen algunas y pueden preferir unas a otras. Es un planteamiento básico, que no niega el sexismo del mundo ni la injusticia para los países menos ricos sino que destaca la dimensión personal donde el candidato a la migración mira su situación y opta por viajar. Y muy fácilmente sale una historia no solo de ganarse la vida sino una visión empresarial y emprendedora, de personas que calculan sus chances, planifican sus futuros y son todo menos víctimas. Los siguientes relatos vienen de un trabajo de Adriana Piscitelli, de la Universidade Estadual de Campinas/UNICAMP, Brasil. He marcado frases en las que se puede oir la voz de personas que están informándose mediante redes, que están tomando decisiones y que tienen una visión a largo plazo de sus vidas.

    ‘¿Salir de mi país para trabajar para comer? Comida tengo en mi país. No preciso estar lejos de mi familia para comer. En Brasil si plantas una mandioca, crías una gallina, comes. No es hambre. Es tratar de hacer algo… Siempre me preocupé por el día de mañana. Cuando tenga 60 años… Tengo un objetivo, quiero juntar dinero para mandar a Brasil y hacer las cosas… Y aquí, si fuera a trabajar en otra cosa, ¿en que sería? ¿Limpiando pisos? Eso no entra en mi cabeza porque se gana muy poco. Si ganase bien, barrería la calle, sin ningún problema. ¿Pero trabajar y ganar 800, 900 euros?

Cuando él [cliente italiano que pasó un período de vacaciones en Fortaleza] se fue, me mandó un e-mail… Empezamos a hablar varias veces por día. . . .  En un mes pagó las deudas que yo tenía en Brasil. Me mandó dinero para que comprase mis cosas, para que hiciera la documentación… Y compró mi pasaje. . .  Hice lo que tenía que hacer, porque si no me casaba tenía que volver al Brasil… Y funciona así. Si una brasileña conoce un extranjero, tiene que casarse porque si no, no deja la vida de allá.

Yo iba siempre a una discoteca… Y había un taxista, que era conocido nuestro. Y me dijo: ¿nena, no quieres ir a trabajar al extranjero? Invitó también a una amiga y a una prima mías… Dijo que se ganaba muchísimo. Le dijimos que sí. Fue con nosotras para que sacáramos el pasaporte. Y un día llamó avisando que íbamos a viajar… Nos dieron el pasaje en el aeropuerto, fuimos a San Pablo y ahí tomamos otro avión. Vinimos por París… Teníamos que venir a Bilbao en tren, donde nos esperaba un hombre… Cuando nos encontramos, nos llevó a tomar café y después a la casa de él, para descansar y después nos llevó al club…  Ellos pagaron el pasaje, la deuda fue un poco más de 3000 euros…

Había una amiga mía que conocía otra, que conocía otra… Y así conseguimos la información, en una agencia de viajes que tiene contactos con clubes de Andalucía. . .  si tú sabes del sitio específico, club de José o de María, pues bien, te damos la información, te ponemos en contacto con la persona. Fui primero a un club de Almería… No era un lugar muy bueno. Pero yo tengo una amiga y ella tenía contactos con una chica de Barcelona que había trabajado en un club y era muy amiga de la dueña. Al final la dueña de ese club de Barcelona nos ha enviado el dinero para pagar nuestra deuda y para venir hasta Barcelona… [Cuando llegué a Barcelona], me quedaban 800 euros por pagar, pero en la primer semana tuve suerte porque he cobrado 1700 y pagué y me quedó dinero para enviar a mi país y ya.

Mi hermana está haciendo una carrera en Brasil, en diciembre acaba y como no hay trabajo, ella viene a España y pagaré yo el billete. Está intentando venir con contrato de trabajo. Eso se consigue en Brasil en el consulado de España. Podría trabajar media jornada en trabajo normal, en el área de ella, ella hace tecnología de producción en Brasil, trabajar en esto y la otra media jornada en la prostitución… que es donde se gana el dinero.

Pagué la deuda en un mes, decidí quedarme [en el club en Bilbao] hasta completar los tres meses. Volví a Brasil. Pero cuando volví, mirando el cambio, me di cuenta que no compensaba más hacer “programa” allá. Dejé pasar los tres meses necesarios y volví a España. Llamé al club y pedí que me enviasen un pasaje, que quería volver para trabajar. Y en una semana estaba de vuelta.

Planeo volver. Tal vez tarde diez años, pero quiero comprar unas casitas, pequeñas, de R$10.000,00 o R$ 15.000,00 alquilarlas y vivir del alquiler. Digamos que compre cuatro casitas baratas, y las alquile a 100, 200R$, ahí tienes un dinero fi jo, sin hacer nada. Y, al mismo tiempo, puedes tener un negocio. Digamos que tienes 6.000 euros, y si aquel negocio no va bien estás arruinado. Pero todavía tienes el alquiler de las casas.

Todo el dinero que gano aquí, lo invierto en Brasil, porque en dos o tres años quiero estar allí. Quiero estar aquí tres meses y tres meses en Brasil con mi familia. Tengo tierras, tengo vacas, en Rondônia. Mis hijos están en Rondônia, entonces mi hijo cuida de estas cosas… Voy enviando dinero para mejorar, para no tener que trabajar más en un par de años. Mando más o menos 1500 por mes para Brasil. Por eso, siempre di valor a lo de aquí. Tengo paciencia con los [clientes] viejos porque sé que con los 20 euros que me dan por veinte minutos, pago cuatro días un peón, allá, en el campo. Hay que tener una visión de las cosas.’

Relatos extraídos de ‘Tránsitos: Circulación de Brasileñas en el ámbito de la transnacionalización de los mercados sexual y matrimonial,’ Horizontes Antropológicos, Porto Alegre, 15, 31, 101-136, 2009

Jesus & strippers

Emily Belz, WorldMag.com

Los Angeles. Near midnight. Industrial buildings. Empty streets. Full parking lot. Men wander into a nondescript building, “Fantasy Castle.” Bouncers stand at the door. Inside, on stage. women dance to earn their rent. Men watch in the dark. Booze, perfume, and loneliness.

A group of young women with fistfuls of flamingo pink gift bags approach the bouncer and offer him cookies—yes, cookies. This is the second strip club they have visited, pulling up in a church minibus: They have five more on their list as they canvass neighborhoods north of Long Beach, south of Compton. The bouncer takes the cookies and lets them inside to the bar, the customers, and the dancers, who are all lined up on the stage.

“I hated lining up—like a cattle call,” remarks Harmony Dust outside the club. Dust, a former stripper, started slipping notes on the windshields of dancers six years ago telling them “you are loved”—and her ministry, I Am a Treasure, was born. Along with other women including former strippers, she lavishes love on women in the sex industry and teaches that Jesus loves them too. On this night, several of the dancers turn away from customers to give the gift-baggers bear hugs and tell them their real names.

Treasures—that’s what most people call the ministry—has a simple recipe: Bring gifts of lip gloss, jewelry, and handwritten cards into dressing rooms in strip clubs. Wait for phone calls, texts, or emails from the women that often come in just hours after the visit. “This is largely a seed-sowing ministry,” said Dust—and when sprouts appear, volunteers help with childcare and rides to church. They listen, talk, mentor, wait, and hope.

. . .  70 percent of Christians admitted to struggling with porn in their daily lives. Another poll by Rick Warren’s pastors.com in 2002 showed 54 percent of pastors had viewed pornography within the last year. . . . Dust started stripping under the name Monique at a club by the airport and managed to complete her undergraduate degree even while she was working in the sex industry at night. . . .

In 2003, while driving to the airport to pick John up, she drove by the same club where she used to strip—but she couldn’t pass it by. Filled with emotion and conviction, she pulled into the parking lot, and the security guard let her put notes on the women’s windshields telling them that they are loved. Then she couldn’t pass by clubs anymore, and she and others who joined her work began building relationships with dancers. She saw women eagerly reach for that same love she found in Jesus.

Dust doesn’t see her role as trying to get women out of the industry or tell them that their jobs are sinful. No one needs to tell them, she said—anyone in the industry feels a certain sickness in her soul. What they need is someone to extend the gospel through love. But she’s quick to say that Treasures volunteers don’t see themselves as strippers’ “saviors.” “I have nothing—I have lip gloss,” Dust said, laughing. “And I probably only have that because of Jesus.” The organization functions off a skeleton of a budget—under $100,000 a year—and Dust won’t apply for federal funds because she doesn’t want anything to interfere with “preaching the Word.”

Rachel Aimee: I think there’s this myth among dancers that the industry is “going downhill” and that dancers across the board are expected to do more than they used to do. I know women who have been working since the 90s and refer to that decade as the “golden age of stripping,” when dancers got paid tons of money just to dance on stage and didn’t even have to touch the customers, but it seems . . .  that dancers have been doing more than just dancing for a long time.

Lauri Shaw: Yes, and in the 90s there were girls who said the same thing about the 80s.  . .

Jodi Sh Doff: In the late 70s there was a lot less regulation. It was years before AIDS reared its ugly head. Tourists, particularly Japanese men, could come off the plane at Kennedy airport, hand a cabbie a slip of paper with just the word “Cookie” on it. Places like the Cookie Jar and Winks were standing room only, bottomless, with stages no higher than, well, than your dinner table. Girls were there for your dining and dancing pleasure, hot lunches they used to be called. The money was insane and there was no hustle. You couldn’t sit and drink with a customer — there was no room. . . By the early 80s the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) code called the shots, and if a club served booze, the girls had to be a minimum of six feet away from the customers and they had to have g-strings. No pulling aside the g-string (although girls did), no touching yourself or them (of course we did that too). That’s when a lot of stages moved behind the actual bar. Diamond Lils was a renegade bar, hence the lack of register tape or financial records of any kind.

RA: Yes, you couldn’t get away with anything like that at clubs I’ve worked at, but I think it’s the norm for lapdances to be pretty heavy contact and sometimes include “extras” (hand jobs, etc.), especially in private rooms. Then of course there are plenty of dancers who just dance and don’t do anything illegal.

LS: All of that’s true, in fact last year Scores lost its liquor license after getting busted for prostitution in 2007. But in the 90s, blatant tricks didn’t happen out in the open like that, out on stage for everyone to see. The rule was generally “no touching the girls onstage.”

RA: I’ve also heard cops arresting dancers just for allegedly agreeing to perform an illegal act. In cases where dancers get busted, of course the clubs never take any responsibility, even if they knew perfectly well what was going on and may have been making money off it.

LS: I do remember one place where a scenario like at Diamond Lils might have flown — the Harmony Theatre. I was only there once. They kept it really dark and made no pretence of being “entertainers.” I don’t think they even bothered serving drinks. I do not remember there being a bar at all. Men sat in those theatre seats and haggled with the girls over the price of a lapdance, which was often a euphemism for a hand job or more.

JshD:The original Harmony was uptown, on 48th Street, right by the Gaiety Burlesque. The Gaiety was an all male dance house with live sex shows and a lot of action going on back stage between sets. Working girls used to hang out in the back rows just to get off their feet for a while. It was a blast, I had a few guy friends who worked the Gaiety. But the Harmony used to be specialty acts, old school star strippers and girls that could pick a dollar up off the table with their cooch. Very impressive if you ask me. I believe the name was changed to the Melody Burlesque and then the Harmony re-opened downtown and it was that free-for-all you’re talking about. All lap dancing, no pretense of being “entertainment” at all.

LS: Exactly, it was a free-for-all. Men could buy anything they wanted at the Harmony, and working girls could buy the freedom to give the men whatever they wanted. There wasn’t a bouncer in sight. The shift manager sat in the coat room, away from all the action.

RA: I’ve never worked at a place that was that free and easy, but I’ve definitely preferred working at clubs where management was more hands-off. At some of the big corporate “gentlemen’s clubs” that have taken over modern-day Manhattan, management are constantly micro-managing everything the dancers do, policing lapdances and pressuring dancers to take customers to private rooms (because they make a huge cut). I think most dancers prefer the freedom to decide for themselves what they’re comfortable with. But in general I find it’s very difficult to have open conversations about who does what in strip clubs because it’s so easy to offend people. There’s so much stigma attached to sex work that it’s easy to unintentionally make someone feel bad if you’re not willing to do something that they are willing to do. Everyone has different boundaries, so I think that tension is always going to exist in the industry.

Imagine a restaurant where a waiter has to pay to come to work and hand over a portion of his tips: So commented a lawyer in Boston, where a group of strippers claim they are treated like indentured servants. That anyone would pay to wait on tables sounds absurd, but it is the conventional employment arrangement for strippers, pole dancers, table dancers and lap dancers. In so many sex-related businesses, normal employment practices go out the window: Owners claim that those dancing or having conversations and sex with customers are not employees but independent contractors, and that the contracts occur between worker and customer, with owners providing only drinks and a location. Which allows owners to wash their hands of any responsibility, conveniently.

This is ridiculous for more than one reason, not least the much higher prices owners can charge for those same drinks when they are imbibed in the presence of dancers. Employers routinely make the argument, however, implying that they are clean and their businesses are not raunchy. In the case of puticlub owners (big brothel and entertainment venues in Spain), owners make the collateral argument that their venues are in every way superior to other sex-industry venues, so that they should be allowed to operate while street sex work and other sorts of sex businesses should be prohibited. Yes, another self-serving argument.

Judge upholds strippers’ pay suit   The Boston Globe

By Jonathan Saltzman, 11 August 2009

About 70 strippers who worked at a Chelsea club are each entitled to recover thousands of dollars in damages in a class-action lawsuit because their employer misclassified them as “independent contractors,’’ depriving them of wages and tips, a judge has ruled. The suit, which a lawyer for one of the strippers described as the first of its kind in Massachusetts, seeks to recover money they should have received at King Arthur’s Lounge in Chelsea since 2004.

King Arthur’s Lounge . . .  did not pay the strippers any salaries, required each to pony up $35 to perform each night, and kept $10 of every $30 that each made for “private dancing’’ in secluded booths, according to a state judge who granted a stripper’s motion for summary judgment on the issue of liability.

The club had argued that selling alcohol is its main business, not putting on strip shows, and that the performers were independent contractors who provided extra entertainment akin to televisions and pool tables at a sports bar.

Suffolk Superior Judge Frances A. McIntyre dismissed that argument. “A court would need to be blind to human instinct to decide that live nude entertainment was equivalent to the wallpaper of routinely-televised matches, games, tournaments, and sports talk in such a place,’’ she wrote. “The dancing is an integral part of King Arthur’s business.’’

McIntyre certified the suit brought by Lucienne Chaves, a 32-year-old former stripper at the club, as a class action on behalf of her and other dancers who were misclassified as independent contractors, said Shannon Liss-Riordan, a Boston lawyer for the strippers. About 70 other strippers who worked at the club are part of the class proceeding to trial on damages.

Liss-Riordan said the strippers at King Arthur’s were like indentured servants, given the $35 fee they had to pay management. “In this case, we have an employer who was charging its employees to work,’’ she said. “They weren’t making minimum wage. They weren’t making any wage. Imagine a restaurant where a waiter has to pay to come to work’’ and hand over a portion of his tips. She estimated that some of the strippers will be entitled to tens of thousands of dollars in damages.

Under the Massachusetts tips law, waiters, bartenders, skycaps, and other service employees must earn a minimum wage of $2.63 an hour. Employers are prohibited from taking a portion of their tips, although a number of restaurants, bars, hotels, and other businesses have violated that provision. The strippers at King Arthur’s were allowed to keep all the tips they received when they performed in an open area, but had to turn over a third of what they made in the private shows, Liss-Riordan said. Chaves, who worked at the club from 2005 to 2007, declined to comment through her lawyers.

Robert R. Berluti, a Boston lawyer for King Arthur’s, said that some of the strippers made hundreds of dollars a shift. That raises questions about whether they suffered financially, he said, although the judge rejected a similar argument in her July 30 ruling. Berluti said McIntyre’s ruling reflected the fact that Massachusetts has one of the strictest laws in the country concerning misclassification of workers as independent contractors. “This was a case where the judge was saddled with a Massachusetts law that makes it an outlier with respect to the rest of the country,’’ he said, adding that his client is considering appealing.

In arguing that the strippers were independent contractors, King Arthur’s said that Chaves got to pick her own music, costumes, partners, and routines. The club also said it never gave her written rules to follow or documentation that she was an employee.

McIntyre rejected that argument, pointing out that the club hired and fired strippers, determined what hours they worked, and “apparently hired its dancers based solely on whether they ‘look good’ rather than individual performance experience or talent.’’

In Japan these places are called love hotels (ラブホテル, rabu hoteru). The one below has multiple doors rather than an attention-getting central entrance. 

The next one has no windows.

Checking in via video screens assures anonymity.

In a well-known middle-American motel from the 1940s, the Coral Court’s rooms had private garages for customers’ cars near St Louis, Missouri.

A lot of commentary stigmatises these hotels as immoral or sleazy, but some of them are quite grand and used by people who only desire privacy, without having anything dramatic to hide. They are also another example of how commercial-sex relations overlap with other social relations.

Propuestas desde el Movimiento de Trabajadoras Sexuales del Perú

La ponencia de Villón sigue en dos partes mas: 2da y 3ra.  

Otra ponencia de la misma ocasión habla de un estudio con trabajadoras sexuales transgéneras. La ponente es Ximena Salazar de la unidad de salud, sexualidad y desarrollo humano de la Universidad Cayetano Heredia.

Conclusiones y Recomendaciones por parte de Sasieta.  

If you live in New York, you’ve got the opportunity to attend Jo’s School of Burlesque and learn, among other things:

• the sexy shimmy
• the tantalizing glove peel
• the devastating bump n grind
• the dazzling tassel-twirl 

Burlesque has never stopped being popular, but for some reason commentators are always saying it’s ‘new’ or ‘under revival’. I often think that the ‘newness’ story is about our being able to know more about everything now that we’ve got the internet, youtube, facebook and so on. Anyway, here’s a CBS report from last year about Jo’s school:

Another ever-contentious element of talks about burlesque involve whether doing it is sex work or not; whether burlesque dancers and strippers are sex workers; whether there is a hierarchy in which some kinds of dance are lower and more sexual (lap dancing is named) while others are more artistic. Jo always says she loves them all.

By the way, when I left the Exotic World contest I was hoarse from cheering so much.